The beauty of watching sports is that anything can happen, and it unfolds before your very eyes. In theory—and usually in reality too—sports outcomes are an ideal substrate for bets in the sense that they aren’t in any way democratic, or corrupted by preference, or based on what a producer thinks will make a good story, and they’re certainly not pre-recorded. This all tends not to be true of narrative TV, but lately that doesn’t stop some of the world’s most ill-advised bettors.
If you’re the world’s biggest mark, and you want to bet your hard-earned money on, say, who dies on the White Lotus, the absurdity of approaching an actual human bookie and saying those words is gone. A prediction market will be more than happy to take your bet, and the entire world can get in on the action. Sure, the rules of the prediction market platforms say the many, many, people who know the outcome you’re putting money on aren’t supposed to take your bet, but, come on…
But even if we stipulate that TV bets are harmless, they come with a nasty externality: spoiler leaks.
For instance, if you’re planning to watch the finale of Top Chef: Carolinas on June 8, I can’t recommend clicking this link to the reality TV section of Polymarket. The community has assigned a 97% probability to a certain contestant’s victory, and that level of unanimity strongly suggests that someone knows something.
According to Variety, 97% was also the probability Kalshi users assigned to the winner of Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans being Aubry Bracco, which it was.
Survivor host Jeff Probst lashed out at the probability markets to Variety yesterday, saying “They have figured out a way to capitalize“ on Survivor, and added, “It doesn’t sit well with me as a human. I get it — they built a great business. They don’t care.”
Variety reports that Kalshi sent out a push notification about Bracco’s apparently high likelihood of winning on the day of the finale. “Aubry’s at 97% — is the island already decided?” the notification teased.
As if an unwanted push notification weren’t bad enough for fans planning to tune in, de facto spoilers like this have escaped containment entirely, providing valuable chum for gossip-based social media accounts like PopCrave, which posted on X last year about Savannah Louie’s 86% chance of winning Survivor 49. She did.
Savannah Louie has an 86% chance to win Survivor season 49, according to Kalshi traders. pic.twitter.com/dTfT8KhJvX
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) December 15, 2025
Per Variety’s reporting, Kalshi bets on Survivor come in extremely suspicious patterns. One user, for example, gambled $45,500 on Bracco in order to make a relatively pathetic $4,500 in profit. Total trading volume for the Survivor 50 outcome was reportedly $32.7 million.
Variety points to reality TV Reddit, and a blog called RealitySteve as past sources of reality TV spoilers for those who seek them out before a finale. But that magazine notes that things are changing around spoilers. The Survivor 50 contestants—assumed for many years to be the source of all reality TV spoilers—were denied advanced knowledge of the winner this time around, and the betting markets spoiled the show anyway, “forcing CBS, a source says, to reckon with the fact that any leak would have had to come from production,” as Variety put it.
Probst lays the blame entirely at the feet of the prediction markets, telling Variety, in a rather self-contradictory statement, the prediction markets “are the ones with the problem, not us. We went and made our show in a vacuum, and we keep it very tightly contained, but if you are foolish and naive enough to not think that somebody might leak it, that’s your problem.”
Kalshi’s representative, meanwhile, essentially said betting markets are a value add for fans of the shows involved, but added that the company is, “looking at adding product features to prevent spoilers.”
